


Barflies

by vaingloriousactor



Category: Assassins - Sondheim/Weidman
Genre: Bittersweet, Drinking, F/M, I'm Going to Hell, JUST READ MY FIC OK, LOOK IT'S ANOTHER ASSASSINS FIC, Middle Aged Characters, Read at Your Own Risk, Smoking, YADDA YADDA I DON'T SUPPORT WHAT THESE PEOPLE DID, bittersweet friendship, you get the point
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-03-29 17:13:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13931595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaingloriousactor/pseuds/vaingloriousactor
Summary: It gets lonely when you're the two oldest people in limbo. Time at once catches up to you and leaves you behind. Sam Byck and Sara Jane Moore share drinks and more in an attempt to connect.





	Barflies

From inside the bar, the two of them can hear the hum of the rest of the carnival just outside the mostly shattered windows. They can hear the voices of the others, a thick Baltimore accent breaking through a feigned Virginian cadence, the exact moment a high voice breaks, crackling into choked tears, the fervor of proselytizing. They can’t hear the words but they hear the voices and they know them all too well. They can guess what they’re saying though, fiery discourse about a war long over. The South had not risen again and the ideals of the Union were just as much of a faint memory.  Byck finishes the glass of whiskey and slams the glass that was dirtied long before that night on the table. Moore beside him takes a drag from a cigarette whose flame kept burning out, pieces of tobacco sticking to her tongue.

“Kids these days.” Byck says, though not without bitterness and Moore snorts a laugh, not without fondness

“They  _ are _ kids aren’t they? Most of them. Even Guiteau is younger than us. Christ, Booth showed up at my feet when I turned up here and the first thing I noticed was how  _ boyish _ he looked underneath that mustache. History books didn’t tell me that one.”

“Czolgosz.”

“Zangara, even.”

“Didn’t even occur to me that Lee Harvey Oswald was, what, twenty two? Twenty four? Something like that.”

They both sigh and slump in their stools.

“You know what I said?” Moore puts out the cigarette, giving up trying to keep it lit. “I said, when I first started planning my move, better me than some kid. Some young dreamer with a whole future. What did I have to lose at that point? So I did it so some kid wouldn’t.” There’s a girlish squeal from outside. “And what happens two weeks later? A kid does the same thing, about as successfully too.”

She watches as the dull colors from outside flash across Byck’s face. They were born the same year and she takes some comfort in that. Someone else who gets it. Born in the same year and yet somewhere in whatever stretched beyond them, she’s alive.  _ How old am I anyway? What year is it? _

“What was it even like when we were kids? We grew up with wars and revolutions. We felt like them. Surely we felt like them.” His words yank her back to whatever present reality they both hover in and she sighs again.  “When you’re a Jew, it always feels like there’s some revolution. Internal, external, I don’t know. You’re born suffering or some shit. Sounds worse than being born a sinner if you ask me. When you’re a born a sinner, you at least half ways expect winding up in a dump like this after you die. We don’t do well with dying young. The best and worst of us live until we’re blind and ancient and that’s how it’s meant to be. No talk of what’s after. I think we’re touchy when it comes to martyrdom. After that one time.”

She’s a bit slow to catch on and when she realizes it’s a joke about Jesus, albeit a cynical one, she laughs, awkwardly, almost sincerely. She thinks about Guiteau, praying to his God, loudly, fervently, kneeling before a gaudy, flashing pin-up girl with her arms outstretched. Byck once asked out loud if that wasn’t a bit sacreligious. 

“I feel we’re at a point, Sam, where we can’t empathize with the folks out there. We’re not sons and daughters I don’t think. They are.”

She had caught Booth once, tossing and turning on a bench, feverish with a furrowed brow. _ Mother, Mother _ he murmured again and again,  his voice straining for someone so far away. This was their pioneer. Even as some other prisoner’s continuous futile attempts at the shooting range sounded and the lights of the Tilt-a-Whirl flashed in his closed eyes, his troubled sleep continued. She had stared at him, knowing in her gut the heartache the actor’s mother must have felt, a ripping deep in her soul that time would not heal.  Even as the skinny young woman trailed after her with her billowing red robes, lecturing her on the ways of the world, all Moore could really feel was pain. Too many children. Far too many children.

“It’s too late now though, isn’t it, for us to do anything for them. They’re stuck here as kids same as we’re stuck here as adults.”

“God could you imagine?” Byck musters a small, sad smile. “Being stuck as kids forever. I’d kill myself.”

“You already did that, Sam.”

“Figuratively.” 

“L’chaim.” He fills a glass with whiskey and slides it to her, emptying the bottle into his own, raising it to the ceiling but not the heavens. He downs the glass, the liquid burns his throat. The sounds and colors whir slightly faster outside and they stare an unmoving dartboard on the wall. How ironic it is, she thinks, to toast to life, when he is dead and she is old somewhere in the abyss but she downs her own glass anyway. 

*****

They stagger out of the bar, trying desperately to feel some rush from the alcohol but all either can feel is a dim simmering deep in their guts.

“You lonely?” He asks with his gruff voice but, through the gravely tone, it’s sincere.

“Sometimes. I never feel like a full person. Does that make sense? I think it makes sense. It made sense for a moment.”

She jostles through her purse to find the keys to the room. All of the rooms seems so out of place in the carnival. Each door a passage to a different time. Moore had once before seen the inside of Booth’s room, all musty velvet, smelling like tobacco and mothballs but never quite home.  Byck opens the door and she curses herself.

“I always forget I don’t need keys to get in.”

*****

The bed is just barely big enough for two lost souls trying desperately to grasp for meaning in each other. The sheets are starched and rough and though neither says as much, they both think of failed family vacation after failed family vacation. Byck stares at the ceiling and Moore lights a cigarette, looking out the window at the lights, red, white, and blue flashing through the blinds. Byck props up and takes a drag from her cigarette before lighting his own.

“Feeling any younger?” She nudges his ankle with her foot, her lips cracking up into a warm-hearted, half-teasing grin.

“Decades.”

“Merry Christmas to me.”

“How’s the conversion process going for you anyway?” He turns to look at her.

“How’d you hear about that?”

“Word travels.”

“Don’t know how it came upon me, myself. Somewhere in the great beyond, it’s what I’m doing I guess.”

“So the mortal plane is suddenly the great beyond?”

“Greater than being trapped here. Present company excluded of course.”

He chuckles and puts his cigarette out on the bedside table right as another failed attempt at the shooting gallery rings out.

*****

When they walk back out to the carnival proper, the ruckus between the assassins seems to have died down.  Booth is reading a magazine seemingly nonchalantly, though one leg is far too stiffly crossed over the other sporting a rapidly fading shiner beneath his left eye, though it’s his disheveled hair that pushes Byck to infer whatever happened in the brief bout of passion he and Moore were entangled in was more than just a petty fight.  Squeaky is sitting cross-legged at his feet humming to herself, swaying to the calypso music more suited to a backyard haunted house than the mostly derelict carnival. Zangara is grumbling and Guiteau has resumed his seat of prayer beneath neon showgirl Jesus and Hinckley is singing. Lee glowers at them all, far to the side, but most of all at Booth and his lip curls up.  Byck puts enough pieces together that he gets that something must’ve happened between Booth and Oswald and suddenly he is no longer newcomer hero to the crew. He spits on the floor when he sees Byck and Moore and swaggers away. The lights keep flashing but everyone is silent. Moore separates herself from Byck and sits next to Booth on the bench, looking over his shoulder at the magazine. It’s from 1903 and she sees he’s reading a poem dedicated to his brother by a member of the club he founded on the twentieth anniversary of his death.

“I’m in the crossword in the back.” He comments when he catches her looking and he flips to the back of the magazine and points at the fine print. “See, the clue is, ‘the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.’” He forces a smile as if he’s posing for a photo, bowing before a crowd and she rubs his shoulder the same way she’d comfort her children.  She thinks again that he is a boy who threw his life away and she sends a knowing glance to Byck who nods. She shifts through her bag again, swearing as she empties it on her lap, handing him a brightly colored marshmallow shaped like a bird with an encouraging smile.

“Don’t eat too many. They'll rot your teeth,” Moore warns him even though any rotten tooth would heal within moments, just as the bruise that was no longer under his eye. “You ok, kiddo?” She gestures at his eye and he sighs, flashing a smile once again, teeth clenched all the while.

“Lee and I had something of a disagreement. He’s brash. I’m an actor, I understand brash people. Perhaps they say I’m the same.”

“That’s not brash,” Moore warns but says little else, catching herself acting more as mother instead of teammate, not a follower to a bold pioneer. “You tell Byck if he does this again. Don’t tell the Proprietor.” She walks away and he’s somewhat dumbfounded for a moment. Squeaky finally looks up as she walks away, grounded for a brief moment in reality. Booth doesn’t say anything but he sits taller, no chinks in his polished armor.

When Moore walks back to Byck and they once again depart from the crowd he nudges her, ever so slightly.

“I’m telling you. We’re becoming their parents.” She doesn’t respond immediately.

“Thank God we aren’t stuck here as kids.” Moore comments at length. “Could you imagine? Being stuck in your twenties forever? I was peak idiot at that time.”

They both snort a laugh of solidarity.

“Maybe the bar’s restocked since we were last there.”

“God willing. We need some reprieve in this hell.”

The music skipped then slowed, temporarily stopping, but the lights never did stop flashing, disorienting fireworks in the dark.


End file.
